"
And with these plates (to be buried at the confluences of the important
rivers along the way) were carried sheets of tin--of white iron--on which
the arms of France had been stamped, to be nailed to trees above the
places of the plates.
"As the Kings of France enjoyed it, or ought to have enjoyed it"--what a
blight of regret was in the very seed that in its flower of to-day makes
one wish for some delicate beauty or subtle fragrance that is not there,
because the Kings of France did not let France enjoy it.
One can but pause here again, as I have paused many, many times in the
preparation of these chapters, to ask what would have been the result if
France had but chosen as Portia's successful suitor in Shakespeare's
"Merchant of Venice" when he was confronted with the caskets of gold,
silver, and lead--had but chosen "to owe and hazard all for lead," instead
of deciding as did the Prince of Morocco, the other suitor, that "a golden
mind stoops not to shows of dross"--if France had hazarded all for the
holding and settling of those regions whose worth was symbolized in those
unpromising pieces of lead planted in the fertile soil of Louisiana,
Michigan, and Ohio along the watercourses, rather than in the caskets of
gold and silver sought among the mountains--if Louis XV, throwing dice at
Versailles in the valley of the Seine, as Parkman describes him, with his
piles of louis d'or before him, and the princes and princesses, dukes and
duchesses and courtiers about him, had but followed the advice of Marquis
de la Galissonniere, the humpbacked governor-general of Canada, who
furnished Celoron with his leaden seeds and appointed the place of the
sowing--if Louis XV had but answered his Canadian governor's prayer and
sent French peasants where the plates were buried, or had even let those
who wanted to flee to that valley, as they would have fled by tens of
thousands, preferring the hardships and privations of the pioneer to the
galleys, the dungeons, or the gallows--then "Versailles" in that valley of
the Ohio would not be merely what it is, a ward or township in a city that
bears the name of a British statesman.
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